LHB Erector Set

November 28, 2006

AVC: You don't print lyrics, but you make them available online. Why not simply make them part of the package, like your artwork?

MJK: Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function. And the right-brain function is far more emotional and has softer edges, so when you first hear the album, you should hear it and feel it. When you start "reading" it, then you're thinking it, and you rob yourself of that initial impression of how the sounds affect you.

Not enough can be said about this landmark record, and no words can do it justice. It’s the sort of album that truly has to be experienced, and in more than just a passing sense. While she at times sounds like a faerie and at others like a cross between Bjork and Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom’s voice is only part of the picture, and the lush orchestration here is the perfect complement to her unique tone. Ys demands attention and analysis, and if you choose to grant both, it will reward your efforts more than any other album this year.

“Right now I got to say I’m enjoying the freedom of being a solo artist. I don’t think that’s always been the case and I’m not sure that will always be the case. I think they’re both really cool things. There’s a hell of a lot of responsibility being, like, the guy, you know?”

NPR's Morning Edition delves into the history of Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Lee Mendelson first paired Guaraldi's music with the Peanuts comic-strip characters for a television documentary about artist Charles Schulz and his pioneering strip.

Excited by the results in the documentary, Mendelson, Schulz and animator Bill Melendez set to work on a Christmas special that featured more of Guaraldi's music. But the network hated both the special and the music.

The Observer asks novelists, actors, and other celebrities for their favorite book of the year.

Adam Mars-Jones
Novelist and critic

With House of Meetings, Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape £15.99) has finally found a setting and a protagonist to accommodate all his jarring traits: the nihilistic swagger, the sourness and severity and self-regard. By writing about Russia under and after Stalin in a style of such exquisite fierceness, he pays tribute to Nabokov but also shames him, by confronting the history Nabokov refused.